This week, several students asked the same question, in a variety of different ways in class. . Essentially, the question boiled down to “Why do we have to learn this?”. I am unsure what exactly prompted these questions. Was it that their curiosity had died? Were we not giving them the right material? Or had sixteen years of life already drained them of the desire to know more, to understand more, and to push the boundaries of what their education could give them. 

Frankly, I should be happy that they were still asking any questions at all.  In A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas, by Warren Berger, the idea of the death of questioning is explored thoroughly, as well as the consequences of this lack of inquiry. In fact, my lamenting of their question, “why do we have to learn this?” fits into a fundamental flaw that Berger sees in our school system, where questioning is discouraged in school as it can be seen as a challenge to the authority of the educator in the classroom.(Berger, 2014) Perhaps that is why I find it so hard to have students ask any questions at all, even when they are in dire need of help. 

Indeed, I can say in the past 5 years of educating high school students in Philadelphia, PA, I have noticed a disturbing trend. Students have taken to a practice of not asking for help or asking any questions at all sometimes, even when they have no clue what is going on. “Lost in the sauce” is how my coworkers and I describe it when a student is so clearly struggling but still refusing to ask for or accept any help, even when it is freely offered. This troubling trend has me thinking about my schooling. Did I ask questions when I needed help? Or did I stew in silent confusion? 

Backing up a bit, I should give context to what exactly my position is at my school. I work with small groups of 3-5 students teaching ELA and reading skills to students who present with gaps in the knowledge or lower than average reading levels. Typically, in these small groups, I have two types of students: those who think they do not need the extra help, and those that do, but have a hard time expressing that. In order to get these types of students on the pathway to learning, I try as often as I can to pose them open-ended questions, inquiries that make them focus on more than just “yes” or “no” answers, but more on the “why” and “how”. (Berger, 2014)

Returning to the idea of “why do my students refuse to ask questions?”I can only wonder about their previous schools, teachers, and classrooms. Berger says that this “death of questioning” has a variety of sources. (Berger, 2014) One that truly stood out to me was this idea that only the educator, the one with all the knowledge, the proverbial “Sage on a stage”, is the only one truly being permitted to ask questions in the classroom, be it by the standards set the by the teacher themselves, or by the culture of classrooms previously set earlier in the students careers. (Berger, 2014) 

I think about all these factors, as well as about the activity I was asked to do this week, the “question quickfire”.  Some of these questions are asked to myself, some I would like my students to ask me, and others have no audience particularly, but are just broad wonders that I have about the subjects I teach. This activity made me think a lot about what kind of teacher I want to be. The questions we ask our students and that they ask us help shape their education, and if we, both students and teachers, can work together to ask questions together, I think that we, as an education system, can begin to undo the damage done to our students, and encourage them to ask better, stronger, and more frequent questions. 

References: 

Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury.